I would be highly unsurprised. Spez has shown in the past he isn’t above screwing with things in the background.
He’s said he plans to change things so subreddit users can vote mods out - specifically aimed at the mods who are keeping subreddits dark. Certainly there’s no room for anything to go wrong with the voting system that he has direct control over which also happens to have no external oversight or means of 3rd party verification.
I do. Reddit was this awesome super/meta community of darn near any specific, niche, rare subject you could think of - and that thing would have a community of its own in a subreddit.
The amount of utility, the breadth of concentrated access to subject matter experience on anything, was utterly unmatched anywhere else.
This is, in my view, the dying of that resource, that super-community, and there isn’t going to be anything that can replace it quickly. That will hurt in the short and medium term.
On the other side of things, it will lead to a diaspora of sorts, with other communities such as this one (kbin), various instances of the Fediverse, Tildes and others seeing a significant period of growth, and, probably, an infusion of resources to speed and improve development for the better.
It sucks right now, but I do have hopes for what will come from the ashes.
You can’t win u/spez, if you strike me down I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.